The problem is that I still believe what I started out believing, I believe there is a logical progression in what I'm saying, that all the objections raised to it seem to me to miss the point...
It seems to me that your idea is kind of like saying that road building can't get past a certain point. To demonstrate this you draw maps of a collection of different roads that all advance up ever narrower and steeper valleys until each one dead ends in a box canyon at the foot of a very large mountain. Conclusion: Roads are dead ends that can't take you to all the places you might wish to go.
Now the problem is that while you are concentrating on the quality of your map, and arguing about how well it represents each of your chosen roads in turn, other people are building other roads around the mountain. Somebody is digging a tunnel. Someone else just invented the airplane and is going to fly over.
Now it may well be that the road in question has gotten narrower and narrower and eventually arrived at an impasse. It may also be that everyone on that road will perish if there is an avalanche.
But there are other roads, and other modes of transportation developing all the time.
Right from the first post of this thread:
My argument is that natural selection and genetic drift, all the processes that select or isolate a portion of a population, do bring about the change called evolution but also always reduce genetic variability, which is the opposite of what evolution needs.
...you seem to ignore all the other changes that are going on in a given population as the particular allele on which you have focused becomes more uniform in that population. Sure, maybe the population has lost variability with regard to directions that a particular evolutionary road can fork, but other roads, and other ways of getting around the mountain have been developing. When a particularly bad winter comes and
no roads are passable, then that tunnel that was quietly being dug is the new reality, and evolution has moved off in a new direction.
Sorry you're frustrated. I went through a phase in my life where I made my head hurt trying to reconcile reality with my foregone religious conclusions too. Consider, as I finally did, that you might just be wrong.
KP
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