A test for claimed knowledge of how macroevolution occurs

Ignoring the duplicated material: And, sadly for you, every time you do this you are criticized for ignoring mutations that increase genetic diversity. Ignoring them does not make them go away nor render them ineffective.Nor is reduction of genetic diversity required for (sub)populations that become isolated from one another. All that is needed to develop new phenotypes are three aspects of evolution that occur in such situations:

1. The ecologies they inhabit are different. They have different plants and animals, the climates are different, the geology is different. These differences can be slight or pronounced.
2. The populations accumulate different random mutations in their respective gene pools because there is little or no gene flow and they are effectively reproductively isolated. This results in different genetic diversity.
3. Selection operates on the different gene pools to fit the different ecologies.

Therefore the gene pools of the subpopulations diverge over time. This produces different phenotypes. The black wildebeests and the blue wildebeests as examples. I'm well aware of your falsified assertions. Mutations are a fact. They are found in every generation of every species. Facts are not assumed.Ignoring mutations do not mean they don't cause differences in population traits. They are part of the genomes of the individuals and part of the gene pool of each isolated population, and they necessarily cause differences in those gene pools. Reproduction in each isolated gene pool is based on the genes in the pool, old (from the parent population) and new (from mutations). Curiously I can find nothing about this. Including the mutations in the gene pool that were not in the parent population. Ignoring them does not make them go away or become ineffective. It is the ecological challenges and opportunities that do the selection. When those challenges and opportunities are different the results of selection will be different.When the gene pools are different the selection process will have different hereditary trait combinations to operate on. This is especially valid for traits that were not in the original population that are beneficial for the current ecological challenges and opportunities for each subpopulation.Enjoy

Why do you think the ToE doesn't believe populations can experience rapid change. If the selection pressures imposed by breeders can effect change over the course of a few generations, then of course selection pressures in the wild can do the same.Mutations are not thought to have played a role with the Pod Mrcaru lizards or the Danish Landrace sheep (Jutland sheep). They're still the same species. If you returned the Pod Mrcaru lizards to Pod Kopiste they'd revert to their original form in fewer generations than it took to change on Pod Mrcaru. Those are examples of selection, not of mutation plus selection which is something that breeders almost never get the opportunity to do. Ultimately all alleles are the result of mutation, and even in the creationist world only mutation can account for any gene that has more than four alleles (not counting clean animals). But you're convinced by nothing more than the echoes of false ideas in your own mind. Simple descent of people results in a nested hierarchy, and we can see it in the DNA analysis of genealogical websites every day. And the same DNA analysis of species also reveals a nested hierarchy. It's there. You can pretend it's not, but you're just playing pretend. I think you still don't understand that breeding is not an analog of evolution. Mutations play almost no role in breeding. The odds of a useful mutation occurring in a breeding population over the course of a breeder's career is tiny tiny tiny, and the odds of a mutation helpful to the breeding program is even tinier. That's why scientists use organisms with very short generation times (hours for some bacteria) for many evolutionary experiments. But how can you believe that after just citing an example of relatively rapid change in the Pod Mrcaru lizards, a lizard that was well established on Pod Kopiste but that was subjected to different selection pressures when moved to Pod Mrcaru? I think everyone has been fairly consistent in stating that beneficial mutations are rare. Mutations are common, around a hundred in every new human, but mutations in coding regions that are beneficial are rare. We've said this over and over and over again in a variety of ways. Changing allele frequencies but not the alleles or the genes or the chromosomes cannot create new species. That's why breeders never create new species. That's why it's called breeding, not speciation. Breeding produces new breeds, not new species. You haven't said anything that is true or anything that reflects an understanding of what people have been telling you for the past 18 years.--Percy

Where you have no argument and/or evidence for your position then you should remain silent. Are you thinking of Message 431 where RAZD said that anagenesis "doesn't result in nested hierarchies because there is no branching"? He meant no branching of species, and only because there has never been a division into separate populations. Of course there is all the normal nested branching of reproduction, but with anagenetic species there is never a point where you can say the old species is gone and the new species has arrived because the change is gradual over time.Explaining in a bit more detail, when a population divides into two or more separated populations then they can evolve into different species that is shown with branching: But with anagenesis a single population changes gradually into a new species. The causative factors are the same as with branching speciation, namely mutation, selection and drift. The chosen speciation points by necessity have an element of arbitrariness: That's all RAZD meant by an absence of branching, because the species change is linear rather than branching.--PercyEdited by Percy, : Typo.

Really? Could you elaborate on this?It is true that there are a substantial number of species that we don't know how they fit into the tree of life (referred to as incertae sedis), but that is different than "don't form nested hierarchies." There are a lot of factors that make classification complicated; such as horizontal gene transfer, the organism is unculturable, the organism has a cryptic lifecycle, and there is just not the financial resources available to study it in depth.Nested hierarchies are one of the primary biological patterns that Biologists want to explain. It is virtually universal across all life (I only say "virtually" because of the issues mentioned above and that classifying life can be very challenging). So, what are some examples of organisms that "don't form nested hierarchies?" It's about patterns, Faith. It takes some kind of organizing principal to create a pattern. When we observe a pattern, or when something is different than what is expected from random chance, that is an indication that some force or factor caused that pattern. Statements that only superficially address a phenomenon without actually offering an explanation for the observed pattern are not useful to science.For example: Fossils are arranged in a distinctive pattern within the geological record. That pattern is an observation that was made before the ToE was proposed and that the pattern exists is undeniable. "Just a bunch of dead things buried in a massive flood" might be a suitable explanation for you, but for the rest of us, it does not even begin to explain the pattern we observe. Sure, it looks like a bunch of dead things buried in rock, but why the distinctive pattern?Nested hierarchies are not an artifact of the ToE, but were recognized even before the ToE was proposed (ie. Linnaeus). This pattern is objective and has real biological significance. Many theories have been proposed to explain this pattern but they were all insufficient until the ToE. I don't claim that the ToE is absolutely true (and no one should be making that claim) but it is currently the best explanation for the pattern we observe in biological life.So you propose a new theory that you claim explains why life falls into this nested hierarchy pattern we observe. I say your explanation for nested hierarchies is as useless as your explanation of the fossil record. Here are a couple reasons why:1. Your theory only considers sexually reproducing diploids. Roughly 75% of the organisms on earth are not sexually reproducing diploids, but asexual haploids. That means they do not undergo sexual recombination. A theory that only attempts to explain less than 25% of the diversity on earth is useless.2. The pattern of neutral markers (those that do not affect phenotype) follow the same general pattern as markers that affect phenotype - meaning they also fall into nested hierarchies that fit the same basic patterns as morphological markers. There is just no good reason why a creator would have started off with a pattern of neutral markers that would mimic the patterns we observe. Could it have been done that way... sure. But unless there is an explanation of why that pattern exists, it is meaningless. Consider cytochrome c that Taq mention earlier. Why would the creator use different sequences of cyt c in every organism he created so that when those sequences change over time, the pattern is of a nested hierarchy that includes separately created organisms?3. Shuffling of alleles alone doesn't account for the diversity we actually observe. If all we had to deal with is 4 alleles at any locus and diversity was due to the reorganization of those 4 alleles, genetic studies would be super easy. But that's not how it is; that just doesn't match our observations. Diversity is much more complicated than that.HBD

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Most of your posts to me are full of nasty interpretations of my motivations. That's pretty foul debating tactics.

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That’s pretty rich coming from someone who calls opponents blind for seeing that your claims are false and who implies that anyone who disagrees with your claims is irrational.

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...if I say I'm not convinced of something it's because I'm not convinced of it, not because I "can't refute" it. Not only did I find out in discussion with RAZD that there are species that don't form nesting hierarchies, but there is absolutely nothing at all meaningful about those that do.

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No, you didn’t.

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And by the way your posts in general are obviously meant just for debunkery without any concern at all for truth.

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That’s not true. I do in fact take care to get things right - while you are repeating an argument shown to be fallacious, pretending that it is a good argument - and denying known facts.

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I'm sure you know that but it needs to be said once in a while...

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I’m sure you know that it is a hypocritical lie.

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...because the powers that be at EvC are very much llke the media who oppose Trump, they have no interest in truth at all, they are only interested in killing whatever they dislike, as are you.

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Yes, we get it, you are an evil lying hypocrite who hates the truth.That is why I don’t accept you as any sort of real Christian.

This is refuted, falsified, rendered inadequate of explaining what is actually observed. Interbreeding between daughter populations becomes less and less viable over time due the occurrence and selection of different mutations in the different populations. Mules an example where interbreeding is almost blocked by the differences in genes/chromosomes. Greenish Warblers an example of reduced gene flow between adjacent subpopulations and reproductive isolation at the ends of the ring with no interbreeding.

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Evolutionary genetics: A ring of species

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... It had been known for some time that north of the Tibetan plateau, a huge treeless desert uninhabitable to a forest-dwelling warbler, there are two forms of greenish warbler that differ in plumage and song, but do not interbreed (viridanus in the west, plumbeitarsus in the east). These populations coexist as distinct biological species in the Siberian lowlands, but are connected through an until recently contiguous breeding range all around the Central Asian mountains. Using amplified fragment length polymorphism markers to survey a large number of anonymous nuclear gene loci, Irwin and co-workers show that there is a genetic continuum throughout this ring-shaped range, except in the zone of overlap in Siberia, where genetic divergence reaches its maximum. The physical distance around the ring is about 9000”km, orders of magnitude larger than the distance an average young greenish warbler will travel from its birth place to its later breeding territory. Genetic distance is strongly correlated with geographic distance throughout the ring of intergrading populations, ...

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Genomic divergence in a ring species complex

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Ring species provide particularly clear demonstrations of how one species can gradually evolve into two, but are rare in nature1,2,3. In the greenish warbler (Phylloscopus trochiloides) species complex, a ring of populations wraps around Tibet. Two reproductively isolated forms co-exist in central Siberia, with a gradient of genetic and phenotypic characteristics through the southern chain of populations connecting them4,5,6. ... Levels of reproductive isolation and genetic introgression are consistent with levels of phenotypic divergence around the ring, with phenotypic similarity and extensive interbreeding across the southwestern contact zone and strong phenotypic divergence and nearly complete reproductive isolation across the northern contact zone. These results cast doubt on the hypothesis that the greenish warbler should be viewed as a rare example of speciation by distance6, but demonstrate that the greenish warbler displays a continuum from slightly divergent neighbouring populations to almost fully reproductively isolated species.

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The genomes are different for the different subspecies and the further apart they are the more different are the genomes ... except at the overlap where the differences from one side are so different from the ones from the other side that interbreeding rarely occurs.The genomes show losses and gains from one subpopulation to the next.Once again your model fails to explain the reality that occurs. Indeed, but now they have become incompatible for interbreeding, and thus they will remain different species. Including mutations is not deception, it is including observed objective empirical evidence that mutations exist, that they become part of the gene pool for each new generation that add their own mutations to the pool.Selection operates on the gene pool of each generation, and as the gene pool changes the selection options change. Curiously it is not a matter of what is necessary, rather it is a matter of what actually happens. Mutations exist and they do get selected. This results in changes that cannot occur with just "normal sexual recombination of existing alleles" -- when we see new alleles we know mutations are involved. The nested hierarchy pattern involves the total gene pool, including mutations, and the gene pool changes from generation to generation due to new mutations added with each generation.The evidence shows that mutations add genetic variability, increasing over time in any population. This renders your remaining argument false or misleading, inadequate in explaining what occurs in the real world.Enjoy

Exactly. So the question of whether or not the evidence of older parent ancestor species continues back to first life (single cell organisms over 3.5 billion years ago), or stops at several points identifying original created kinds, and this becomes a test of the creation model versus the EoT model.So far the evidence points to a single first life (single cell organisms over 3.5 billion years ago), invalidating the creation model but congruent with the ToE model. And this too has been falsified. We can see genetic evidence of certain traits being changed by mutatons. They aren't lost but replaced. But, as noted by others, we do. Except in the wild selection can be much slower. What we do see is increased genetic variation over time as mutations accumulate in each generation. They are in the gene pool for each generation, thus the time "to blend the new gene frequencies from any founding group also includes blending in the mutations that have occurred since the founding group. Indeed. As I keep saying "macroevolution" is the result of microevolution over multiple generations. The accumulation of random mutations and the continued selection for survival and reproduction in a changing ecology result in "macro" changes that are more than what occurs in a single generation. For the PHENOTYPIC diversity to increase, the GENOMIC diversity has to increase in order to be expressed as new phenotypes. Except that random mutations are added to the gene pool in every generation. Again, it is not a matter of what minimal combinations that have to occur to produce new phenotypes, it is a matter of what does occur, and that includes mutations that are added to the gene pool generation by generation with measurable results.These random mutations can be tracked to show what are added by each generation. Some alleles may be lost (or modified by mutation), but loss alone is not sufficient to explain the observed genetic combinations with mutations that do not exist in the founding population. The evidence shows that all life is related to the first life formed over 3.5 billion years ago, and not divided into different created kinds with no previous ancestors (other than LUCA). Curiously that does not change the fact that the evidence falsifies creation of Kinds. Ignoring the evidence does not change this fact. If your interpretation does not match reality then it is flawed. Except that the real world includes mutations added to the gene pool generation after generation, which results in changes in the breeding population that at some point is outside the variations seen in the founding population. That is macroevolution according to the scientific definitions: the accumulation of mutations over time, changing the gene pool, changing the phenotypes derived from the changing gene pool.Your exclusion of random mutations from your model renders it inadequate and terminally flawed in explaining what occurs, because mutations are part of evolution, of all life as we know it.EnjoyEdited by RAZD, : .

Flat Earthers are not convinced the Earth is round, and yet it is still round. Reality has this strange property of not conforming itself to our beliefs.More to the point, your creation model can not explain the observed facts.The evolutionary model does explain these facts, and you have not presented any arguments showing that the evolutionary model does not predict these observed facts.All we are left with is your denial in the face of overwhelming evidence. It is nothing more than Flat Earthism.

Concerning the argument that genetic diversity is lost: And you've missed the whole point that anything that gets added has to get cut down to create a new species.But I've made the case so many times to such utter futility I'm too tired, if that's the word, to continue it now. I just wanted to say that much.Once the establishment has its teeth sunk so deeply into its point of view there's no hope. Not at EvC anyway.

And you are still wrong.

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And you've missed the whole point that anything that gets added has to get cut down to create a new species.

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No, he hasn’t. You are missing the point that the evolution is a balance between mutation and selection.If the amount cut down is equal to the amount gained since the last speciation event there is no net loss of diversity. It comes down to the numbers and we can only work out the numbers through evidence. Purely theoretical arguments that ignore the numbers cannot work (an obvious point, one would think but one you have missed again and again through the history of this argument).

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But I've made the case so many times to such utter futility I'm too tired, if that's the word, to continue it now. I just wanted to say that much.

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You have never made the case. You have failed time and time again because you don’t have the evidence.

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Once the establishment has its teeth sunk so deeply into its point of view there's no hope. Not at EvC anyway.

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So you are actually complaining that we don’t change our minds and agree with you when you obviously have no real case, when the evidence is against you and even the purely theoretical arguments don’t work in your favour ?You don’t change your mind that easily, so why should we ? And your dishonest and arrogant and nasty attitude don’t help. Do you think they should ?

You don't have to remove new mutations to create a new species. You can select for the new mutations and remove the original alleles through selection. Rinse and repeat.Edited by Taq, : No reason given.

Sorry, but your opinion is incapable of altering reality. There is no reason for this blind assertion to be valid. You have made the assertion many times, but you have not made the case for it ... because (a) you have not presented any evidence to support it, and (b) the evidence of speciation events that have been observed invalidate it.Possibly you are tired because it is a symptom of reaction to the cognitive dissonance. It is one way to cope with the continuing presentation of contrary evidence, the mountain of evidence that you are wrong. You don't want to confront it, so you become tired. and cranky. Once the evidence of reality has its teeth sunk so deeply into its point of view there's no hope. Not at EvC anyway.There fixed it for youEnjoy

... mutations are intentionally culled to preserve the breeds ... once they have evolved by mutation from a parent stock. Curiously, you can't have a "chosen breed" until it has evolved by added mutations that didn't exist in the parent stock. Which is precisely why it is NOT a model of natural evolution. It is a model of selection, as noted by Darwin, and nothing more. Selection is only part of evolution, and the other part is mutations: Except that evolution in the wild doesn't have to eliminate "everything that doesn't fit the chosen set of traits" because in the wild there are many different "set of traits" that can benefit survival and reproduction.If you would but open your eyes you would see that there is a much wider range of traits that can benefit survival and reproduction than occur in selective breeding, where the purpose is to preserve the breed. The purpose of breeding is to prevent evolution from changing the breed/s.You can't get change when the purpose is preservation of the breed. Evolution depends on whatever is good for survival and reproduction.What you get trashed for, is repeating points that are falsified. By Evidence. Because evidence from the real world invalidates your opinions/assertions. Yes, there are mutual admiration groups of want to believers, but they don't confront reality. You want to chane the minds of people who accept evidence, then you need to present evidence, not assertion upon assertion.Enjoy

Loss? But we've seen gains. Consider the development by early humans of new species of wheat.

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Varieties of wheat that have forty-two chromosomes are the most recently evolved and most used types of wheat. All of these varieties have been cultivated by humans (as opposed to growing wild). They are hybrids of twenty-eight-chromosome wheats and wild fourteen-chromosome wheats or grasses. Early bread wheat was the result of the crossing of goat grass (Aegilops tauschii ) with Triticum turgidum. Modern bread wheat varieties have forty-two chromosomes and evolved from crosses between emmer and goat grass, which is the source of the unique glutenin genes that give bread dough the ability to form gluten. Goat grass grows abundantly in the region stretching from Greece to Afghanistan. Descriptions of the fourteen species of wheat that yield the thousands of wheat varieties grown today are provided here.

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Just a moment...